Our website uses cookies to improve your user experience. If you continue browsing, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies. More information can be found in our Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy.

Four useful tips for making online ads relevant & personal

Contrary to what we in the industry might like to think, most people have total antipathy towards advertising. At best it’s a necessary evil.

But advertising really could be so much more, providing it’s useful. And the way to make something useful is to make it relevant, through contextualisation and personalisation.

Every brand worth its salt uses some form of contextual targeting to entice users in – be it through display targeting, RLSAs, or promoting certain pieces of content or products on their website based on previous visits.

Google’s announcement of its Google Analytics 360 Suite, with its Audience Centre, Data Studio and Optimisation solution will certainly go some way to helping brands be better at placing customers at the heart of their marketing.

The wider issue is – this isn’t something you set up once, tick the box and you’re done.

Achieving that authentic personal touch is an infinite evolution and one that should include the following considerations:

1. Combine multiple data sources

We’ve all seen the BBC’s Sherlock, right? It’s impressive how he can infer so much about someone just by looking at them.

We can do something similar online, but we have to start to look beyond the basic targeting Google allows. Combining multiple ‘clues’ about your audience to build up a better picture of them is the key to accurate targeting.

You’ll find you can get most of this from your analytics, your CRM database, your social networks.

Sure it can be time consuming stitching them all together. But it’s worth it.

Unsurprisingly, online supermarkets seem to be the best at this (and some are laying the foundations for pre-empting shipping). A lot of other brands think it doesn’t apply to them. It does.

2. Allow feedback, and learn from it

People’s circumstances change – those in market today are not necessarily looking for the same product tomorrow. You need to adapt.

Good advertisers will recognise this and change their approach. Great advertisers will engage with their customers to understand how best they want to be communicated with.

3. Stop forcing an experience on your audience, instead build one around them

Blanket retargeting everyone who ever looked at that new sofa product page you created will get you some conversions, sure.

But you’ll also have annoyed a lot of people, who for whatever reason just didn’t want to buy that sofa in the first place. Be more nuanced – develop separate, personalised strategies depending on the type of people you’d like to engage with.

The hard sell is only necessary when you’re time pressured – you can often afford to be more relaxed, and more tailored with your approach, online.

4. ‘Offsite’ and ‘onsite’ do not live in separate bubbles

You can spend millions crafting a beautifully personalised experience around your audience on your website.

But if your ‘offsite’ acquisition strategy is based around shoving poorly targeted advertising down people’s throats then the best you can hope for is your site experience being able to compensate for a poor journey on the way there.

A contextual, personal touch in guiding the way is at least as important as the experience once you arrive. The content you expose to people to on their route to your website plays a defining role in the conversion (or lack thereof) you achieve on their exit.

Following someone across the internet for weeks on end with banners promoting a sofa they fleetingly considered purchasing is the online equivalent of employing someone to continually stalk a customer with a ‘Buy this Sofa!’ placard.

We often discuss the state of display ads on this blog, sadly it is not always in the most positive light, and it seems the majority of marketers agree with us. But there is hope for a better approach.

Sixty-six percent of brand marketers and media buyers in Australia surveyed in our recent People-Based Advertising report either agree or strongly agree that the current model for display advertising is broken, and only 12% disagree that it is.

Companies are pouring billions of dollars a year into social media and influencer marketing campaigns, many of which target consumers on Facebook-owned Instagram, in an effort to parlay social engagement into sales.